True. In a sense, being a successful musician is more like winning the lottery. The best songwriter in the world isn’t going to sell shit without a label behind them.

I think your point stands generally, but Paul McCartney is a billionaire and I don’t think writing a bunch of pleasant tunes qualifies as “dark Machiavellian deeds”.

This is libelous. His business practices were also shady in the '70s and '80s.

the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate)

There was a study years ago in Norway where they wanted to see if there were correlations between any disease and living underneath high-voltage power lines. They found that 5% of all diseases were so correlated … when using an alpha of .05.

Where I live (Philly suburb) there was an incident where a guy driving a 12,000 gallon gasoline truck pumped out 4000 gallons at his first gas station stop and then decided he just wanted to go home rather than making the rest of his deliveries. So he ran the hose to the back of the station and dumped the other 8000 gallons onto the ground. This happened to be right above a creek and about 200 feet from an elementary school.

It just doesn’t make any sense how anybody could be this stupid. He got 20 years in prison for it or something like that. He certainly deserved it, but meanwhile executives who manage to create far worse disasters never see a day in jail.

Don’t discount the Saudis. They don’t have wealth, they have a wealth faucet.

He claims to work 100 hours per week, but that’s still less than 20 hours per company.

They will also need rigorous safety testing before a new product like this is even allowed to be sold.

Sweet summer child …

Enron is a pretty good one too

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the NBA draft lottery is rigged. People always say “oh no it couldn’t possibly be rigged because it’s overseen by the accounting firm Ernst & Young”. It used to be overseen by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen until they got busted aiding and abetting the Enron scam.

I think Jim Morrison re-emerged as Val Kilmer.

Yeah, USD.

I live in the Philly metro area and you see exactly 0 tiny homes around here. They are just not allowed by any municipality, anywhere. The closest I’ve found are at a sort of tiny home park in Lancaster, about an hour and a half away. And the owner of that development had to fight tooth and nail for years to get approval for it.

I bought a home six years ago for cash. Unfortunately it is a used school bus and I can’t actually live in it legally anywhere.

I was looking at one of these a few years ago, a decent 1BR unit for $125K. I thought that was reasonable until I learned that the condo fee was $960 per month and that the building had hit owners with special assessments for about $10K each year for the three years prior. Like, I’m supposed to pay almost $2000 a month just to live in an apartment that I already bought?

I just bought an actual 2BR house for $140K and the cost of my taxes plus homeowners insurance comes to $400 a month.

I always laugh when conservatives describe Cali as a “shit hole”. Yes, that’s exactly why property is so cheap in California, because nobody wants to live in such an awful place.

You get what you pay for.

Around the world, rich people often do relocate personally for tax purposes. One of the reasons we don’t often see rich people in the United States do this is that we have incredibly low taxes compared to the rest of the world. And that’s just nominal tax rates; in practice the super-rich pay almost nothing, which makes it even weirder how rabidly anti-tax they are.

There is quite a bit of business relocation that happens because companies are lured to different locales through tax abatements.

We used to have a “Guess what?” “What?” “Nope!” routine going as kids. I still laugh at that one for no valid reason.

“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” - fiscal conservative Dick Cheney